Speech and Audio Coding for Wireless and Network Applications contains 34 chapters, loosely grouped into six topical areas. The chapters in this volume reflect the progress and present the state of the art in low—bit—rate speech coding, primarily at bit rates from 2.4 kbit/s to 16 kbit/s. Together they represent important contributions from leading researchers in the speech coding community. Speech and Audio Coding for Wireless and Network Applications contains contributions describing technologies that are under consideration as standards for such applications as digital cellular communications (the half—rate American and European coding standards). A brief Introduction is followed by a section dedicated to low—delay speech coding, a research direction which emerged as a result of the CCITT requirement for a universal low—delay 16 kbit/s speech coding technology and now continues with the objective of achieving toll quality with moderate delay at a rate of 8 kbit/s. A section on the important topic of speech quality evaluation is then presented. This is followed by a section on speech coding for wireless transmission, and a section on audio coding which covers not only 7 kHz bandwidth speech, but also wideband coding applicable to high fidelity music. The book concludes with a section on speech coding for noisy transmission channels, followed by a section addressing future research directions. Speech and Audio Coding for Wireless and Network Applications presents a cross—section of the key contributions in speech and audio coding which have emerged recently. For this reason, the book is a valuable reference for all researchers and graduate students in the speech coding community.